Tea at Stewart’s Hospital

(Bealtaine Workshop)

Come into the room with me. Lay out the table, put your cloth on bare wood. Make your centrepiece a dragon shaped tea-pot, a pinch of this, a drizzle of that, so scents linger on the empty chairs. The mantelpiece with huge mirror glints the light of this May day, colours from the garden I cannot see from this angle. These cups and spoons are my own, this purple glass sugar bowl bought last year in Venice, shaped like a gondola.

I wait for sounds of footsteps, rubber soles on waxen floorswhite faces reflecting in the wide mirror. Two sisters, arms linked, are the first to peer around the doorframe. All their adult lives in this place – looking out for each other, two men, smiling yet withdrawn, I don’t remember names. My voice welcomes them, eases us into the gathering of ourselves; kettle coming to the boil, tea-leaves infusing, then poured.

There’s an eagle in a sister’s cup, rising into air. Below her nest, tangled lines weave like a switchboard transferring voices.

The other sister gets a bull’s head outline, a moon on the white rim, an elephant trunk raised, all burden lifted. Elephant for long life, preservation.

One of the men stares at the bottom of his cup, a dreaming look takes him far away on a tugboat held at anchor many years. The bottom of the other man’s cup is full of letters opening and closing, blowfish gasping for air. My cup shows me my pelvic bone – four children passed through, finding their destinies.

After tea, Victoria sponge, strawberry jam; comes the singing. The man whose dreaming place is traced in leaves on porcelain rocks backwards and forwards, a sound filling his throat; the same primal sound our cat makes before springing on a bird. I think of the yogi swallowing down the linen rope, Sauca, pulling it up from the depths of bile, inch by solid inch.